Chevron 'confident' in oil drilling safety

Chevron Canada is "quite confident" it will not cause a catastrophic oil spill like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, a top executive said Thursday.

The company runs exploratory and production operations in Atlantic and northern Canada, as well as in the Alberta oilsands.

In May, it set a record for the deepest underwater operation in Canadian history when it drilled an exploratory well more than two kilometres below the water's surface in Newfoundland's Orphan Basin. The well, dubbed Lona 0-55, is about 400 kilometres northeast of St. John's.

"We're quite confident in our ability to drill in these water depths," Mark MacLeod, Chevron's vice-president for Atlantic Canada, said Thursday at a Senate committee meeting.

"The water depth at the Lona location is 2,600 metres. Chevron has drilled at depths greater than that."

Chevron Canada's parent company, the California-based Chevron Corp., is the second-largest integrated energy company in the U.S. and the biggest operator in the Gulf of Mexico. It says that 57 per cent of the exploratory wells it drills turn out to be successful sources of oil.

MacLeod estimates it has drilled more than 300 deepwater wells without any major incidents.

Chevron defends practices

Its fellow oil giant BP is struggling to salvage its own reputation after a safety device called a blowout preventer at one of its wells in the Gulf of Mexico failed and caused a drilling rig to explode on April 20. The damaged well has been leaking oil ever since.

But MacLeod insists Chevron's safety practices are the best in the industry.

"Do it safely, or not at all, and there's always time to do it right," MacLeod told the committee. "We live by that."

The company stepped up its safety protocols after the BP disaster.

Chevron never intended to draw oil from the Lona project, which was for exploration purposes only.

But it was forced nevertheless to run thousands of simulations of a blowout as part of Newfoundland's tough approval process.

"A colleague of mine closely associated with this particular drilling operation, and who has decades of worldwide experience, said to me the other day [that Newfoundland's] is one of the toughest regimes he's ever worked in," MacLeod said.

Chevron has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development in the field, he said.

But Conservative Senator Judith Seidman questioned how prepared the company really is for an out-of-control blowout:  

"Clearly, the oil would not be gushing all these days into the Gulf if there was the [research and development] that would immediately produce the solution," Seidman said.

MacLeod said research will likely evolve as a result of the lessons learned from the BP spill.

"I firmly believe … as we learn more about what happened [in the Gulf], we will look at containment methods," said MacLeod.

"But our focus is on preventing ... incidents like this."

Chevron is developing new blowout prevention technology, with the aim of one day drilling in Canada's Far North, he said.